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The most used word in Roxana Robinson’s brilliant and devastating novel Cost is “unbearable” and its variants. The word sums up perfectly the emotions, choices and horrible ironies that buffet a patrician, buttoned-up family whose youngest son is a heroin addict.

This tragedy comes on the heels of a more usual one. Julia Treadwell Lambert’s parents, who are guests in her Maine summer home, are elderly and fading. The book begins with her ever cheerful mother, Katharine, realizing with her Zen equanimity that she’s losing her memory. Julia’s father Edward isn’t losing his memory, but his body is betraying him. Into the mix comes Julia’s older, responsible son Steve, back from a failure to save the trees in the Northwest; her brittle sister Harriet; and Julia’s ex-husband Wendell, angry and uncomprehending at what’s happening to his younger son Jack.

Jack is largely the reason for all the “unbearables” scattered throughout the narrative. Talented and funny when he’s in his right mind, he’s intelligent enough to compare himself to a desert prophet as he joneses for heroin, but he can’t stay off the path to self-destruction. The family interventions led by Ralph Carpenter, head of a rehab program, are excruciating, and absurd. The stiff-necked and hypercritical Edward was a neurosurgeon, but all his knowledge of the human brain can’t help his grandson, whose own brain has been hijacked by one of the most insidious drugs known. Sweet, smiling Katharine hardly knows who Jack is anymore; Harriet hardly knew who he was in the first place. Steve, who dedicated their childhood to getting his brother out of scrapes, is helpless. Jack’s predicament dredges up the old bitterness between his parents, even as it draws them closer.

A reader searching for a nice book about a bucolic summer in a gently rundown beach house won’t find it here. Robinson’s descriptions of Jack’s physical pain and discomfort, insane cravings and general madness are some of the most harrowing passages this reviewer has ever read. Cost is a perfect title for this wrenching book; everything this family does seems to extract a price that’s too high to pay.

The title of John Dufresne’s fourth novel nicely sums up his distaste for writing any English phrase without at least a double meaning. Requiem, Mass.: so the name of your hometown in Massachusetts also happens to be the name for the Catholic service for the dead – what’s so strange about that? Nothing could be more fitting, especially when so many people you know leave you bereft, or (one way or another) try to.

Holding onto a single, linear reality or narrative thread is impossible for Johnny Boy, the book’s hero/narrator without a surname (unless it is Dufresne). While a man-child – no boyhood was vouchsafed to him – his insane mother, runaway father, fey sister and cruel teachers all imposed upon him the imaginative necessity for constructing alternative realities. Of course, that is precisely what Johnny Boy’s parents have been doing all along, so he is evidently doomed to become a writer of fiction by both nature and nurture.

Dufresne’s orchestration of wayward strands of storytelling makes him a worthy heir to Laurence Sterne, James Joyce and William Faulkner. Like those masters, Dufresne is committed to the essential polyphony of individual consciousness. At one point, no fewer than five distinct strands of narrative intertwine, each one drawn from a different period of Johnny Boy’s life. Reading this chapter feels like watching a juggler spin in the air five knives of completely different sizes (the title of the chapter is “Knife in the Head”). The risk is enormous; the author (like the juggler) stands on a knife’s edge between self-destruction and redemption. But the alternatives to this perilous legerdemain are patently far worse for Johnny Boy: a mother’s madness or a father’s endless string of betrayals.

Like Sterne’s and Joyce’s, Dufresne’s gloriously lucid chaos of prose presents an eminently comic approach to life. Like Faulkner’s, his writing makes rich contrapuntal music out of boundless tragedy. Such a paradox surpasses the category of “tragicomedy,” which Dufresne’s publisher would have us accept. The fitful bonds of love that hold Johnny Boy’s people to each other are neither comic nor tragic. They are pure song, the requiem we deliver upon those we love whose fates are beyond our control.

Michael Alec Rose is a music professor at Vanderbilt University.

Diane McKinney-Whetstone has made a career out of documenting the lives of ordinary African Americans, mostly women trying to get by in Philadelphia. (She seems to be to women from Philly what August Wilson was to men from Pittsburgh.) In Trading Dreams at Midnight, the sorrows of one generation are passed down to the next.

The novel tells the story of Nan; her beloved but disturbed daughter, Freeda; and Freeda’s two daughters, the restless Neena and the stable and successful Tish. Freeda has never been quite right. Nan blames herself, since she believes she won Freeda’s father’s love through a potion and their daughter’s strange mood swings are her punishment. Freeda’s mental illness leads her to drop in and out of her mother’s life, and, eventually, to abandon her girls to be raised by Nan. While both sisters are wounded by their mother’s abandonment, Neena, who makes her living ripping off gullible men, finds Freeda’s loss unbearable, and dedicates her life to finding her again. Tish, on the other hand, marries a good man, has a great job as a TV newswoman, and is soon to be a mother herself.

Once again McKinney-Whetstone writes with empathy, compassion and discernment, even if her characters aren’t the nicest people to know. Neena may be a con artist, but her raw pain is described with devastating accuracy. Nan may be rigid, but she’s a good woman capable of great love. At the book’s end she learns something that both releases her and breaks her heart, and there are hints that this vicious circle of pain just might come to an end. Trading Dreams at Midnight is a beautifully written and poignant work about the power and limitations of family love.

Arlene McKanic writes from South Carolina.